A Plague on The Plains

December 16, 2002 Newsweek by Dirk Johnson and Andrew Murr; With
Elizabeth Austin in Chicago

A mysterious wasting disease infecting herds of deer has turned
the hunting season into a brutal slaughter

BODY:
On a frozen morning in hilly rural Wisconsin, the dead deer lay
stacked in a pile, like so much garbage. Big and
brawny, these whitetail bucks and does should be prizes. But the
hunters who shot them were afraid to take
them home. A mysterious sickness called chronic wasting disease,
closely linked to the mad-cow illness that
terrorized England, has been cropping up in elk and deer in the
Rockies and the upper Midwest. There have
been no documented cases of humans' contracting the deadly brain
disease, and health officials are not
warning people to stop eating venison. But because of the way mad
cow made its leap from cattle to
humans--despite earlier reassurances that it couldn't
happen--government scientists are testing for danger. At
this point, says Richard Race of the Rocky Mountain Laboratories,
"we know hardly anything." In places like
Wisconsin, where hunting is a $1 billion industry, fears about
the disease have sparked radical measures. State
hunting officials have declared a kill-them-all policy in one
region where CWD has been found. In this
"eradication zone," hunters traditionally limited to taking a
single deer can now shoot 100 or more. The hunting
season usually lasts nine days, but in the eradication zone,
hunting started in June and will run through the end
of January. Hunters like Mark Peck say this has turned sport into
slaughter. "Deer have always been considered
sacred around here," says Peck, a 42-year-old farmer. "Now
they've been relegated to rat status."

The mysterious illness has also cast a nationwide pall on
hunting, a sport that has already seen its ranks
dwindle. The number of outdoorsmen in America fell by 7 percent
in the '90s, according to a new federal study.
"It's a change in the culture," says George Smith, executive
director of the Sportsman's Alliance of Maine. "Old
hunters are dying and young people aren't taking it up. And now
this comes along--and people see it as just
another reason not to go hunting." CWD has scared off outdoorsmen
like Marlyn Redel, 74, who has been
hunting since he was 12. "I didn't even go out this year," says
Redel. "Nobody knows how widespread this is.
And my wife told me, 'You're not bringing it into the house'."

The disease, marked by emaciation and uncontrollable drooling
in elk and deer, has been around for decades.
It was initially spotted in captive deer in Colorado in 1967, and
first appeared in a wild elk in 1981. In the
disease, brain proteins change shape and begin killing cells, but
it's not known why that happens. Through
most of the 1980s and 1990s, the disease seemed limited to the
High Plains. Then in the late 1990s, it turned
up in game ranches in Colorado and Montana. But the real alarm
came earlier this year, when the disease
jumped the Mississippi. So far this year, scores of cases have
been detected in Wisconsin. The first case of a
diseased deer was documented in Illinois in November.

Officials in some states, including Wisconsin, are sawing off
the heads of killed deer and sending them to a
laboratory for testing. They advise hunters to freeze meat until
tests determine if their deer was infected.
Infected carcasses will be incinerated, while those without the
disease will be buried in a landfill. The bodies of
dead deer unwanted by hunters--about half of those killed in the
eradication zone were left behind--will be kept
in cold storage until the results of the tests, which will take
three to six months. They will then be buried or
burned, depending on the findings.

In the meantime, Wisconsin officials are telling hunters to
take precautions, said Laurel Steffes of the state
Department of Natural Resources. Hunters are being urged not to
saw through bones of the deer when they
butcher them. They're also told not to eat certain deer parts,
such as the brain, tonsils and eyeballs. Wisconsin
has an overpopulation of deer, a problem that resulted in some
47,000 car-deer accidents last year. "The deer
simply doesn't have many predators anymore," says Steffes.

A national sportsman's group, Whitetails Unlimited, has posted
billboards in Wisconsin urging hunters to kill
deer in the eradication zone. "There's nothing like this in the
history of deer management," says Peter J. Gerl,
the group's executive director. He fears that, left untended, the
disease could wipe out the state's deer
population. "Eradication of this herd is a very small price to
pay to stop this disease." But landowners have
fought the campaign. David Mandell, a lawyer for Citizens Against
Deer Slaughter, says residents fear their
property values will drop if all deer are eliminated. "Some
people bought this land specifically to go hunting," he
says.

Peck, who hunts with his 12-year-old son Garrett, has resisted
the state's call to kill. He will not shoot more deer
than his family can eat. "That just rubs wrong against the
hunting ethic," he says. As he trudged through the
red-oak woods with his son one recent morning, Peck spotted a
deer, standing still as a painting, and took aim,
firing a single shot that cracked the early-morning silence. With
his own rifle, Garrett shot an eight-point buck, a
deer that hobbled a few yards, dripping a trail of blood, before
collapsing. Father and son walked over to their
kills, then knelt to inspect the dead animals for signs of
sickness. "Looks pretty fat and sassy," Peck said.
"There's nothing wrong with that deer."

Peck believes any chance of contracting the disease is
"smaller than a lot of risks I take in my life," like driving
his truck. But even in the Peck home, questions arise. Peck's
11-year-old son Nathan, who is more drawn to
basketball and Nintendo than hunting, looked at a plate of
venison sausage at dinner one night, and asked:
"Can we be sure this doesn't have CWD?" Peck answered, "You don't
have to eat it if you don't want to." Nathan
gobbled it up.

Early next year the Rocky Mountain Laboratories will begin
testing monkeys to see if CWD can be passed by
eating. If the disease never materializes, the monkeys won't be
the only lucky ones. The primates are
stand-ins for people. Although the results of the study won't be
definitive, the findings will be an important
milestone on the road to understanding the disease. Researchers
say it will be many years before science can
nail down the question of human susceptibility, and incubation
periods could be 10 to 15 years. Venison eaters
are going to have to live with uncertainty for a long time.

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